“I wanted to talk to you about my husband’s case,” I say, and at this his mouth parts in questioning. There is no case.
“You mean his accident?” he asks, and I shrug my shoulders, but I don’t say yes or no. Accident implies that something has happened unintentionally and without deliberate cause. I’m no longer sure that’s the case.
“I have reason to believe that foul play was to blame.”
I watch the expression on his face. A single eyebrow elevates, the other droops. He doesn’t smile. For a long time, he doesn’t say a thing.
And then, after a while he asks, “And why is that, Mrs. Solberg?” His eyes never once wander from mine, as he sips lingeringly from a mug of coffee, taking his time. The room is cold, the air conditioner working overtime to counter the temperature outside. I feel suddenly awkward in the detective’s eyes, repulsive and fat, the extra baby weight stuffed into the elastic panel of a pair of maternity pants. The dried sweat clings to my skin; my underarms begin to reek.
“My daughter has been having nightmares,” I say, trying to return his sustained stare. It’s not so hard to do. “She’s been having nightmares about the accident. Flashbacks. Except that in these flashbacks there’s abad manfollowing her and Nick. A bad man in a black car,” I say, taking the liberty of consolidating the stories and filling in the missing details. “Perhaps there was another car out on Harvey Road that day, one that pushed Nick and Maisie off the road. Perhaps this car,” I say as I set my smartphone on the table between us and find the image of the car and a close-up of its license plate. Detective Kaufman narrows his eyes at the images on the screen, but they don’t look for long.
“Your daughter told you there was a car following her and Mr. Solberg on Harvey Road?” he asks, and I nod my head and easily commit perjury.
“Yes,” I say, believing in her own way that Maisie did say these words to me. I asked point-blank if the man was in a car, and she said yes. When I asked if the car was black, Maisie let out a howl and ran, unlike when I asked if it was red or blue, to which she shook her head and said no.
“Why do you think this is the car?” he asks, and so I tell him about the scene in the grocery store parking lot this afternoon, my Maisie running helter-skelter through the cars in fright. I tell him how she wet her pants, how she screamed over and over againno, no, no, no, no. The detective seems disinterested in this. He doesn’t write any of it down, nor does the expression of his face change.
Only when I stop talking does he speak.
I’m informed of things I never knew. How when Nick died, a crash reconstructionist was called to the scene. A crash reconstructionist, Detective Kaufman explains—as he brings me my own Styrofoam cup of coffee and a box of tissues—provides an in-depth analysis of a crash site, particularly those involving fatalities such as Nick’s. This analysis includes how fast a driver was going at the time of impact, the road and weather conditions, whether or not homicide is to blame for the death, or manslaughter, or just bad luck. At the scene, measurements and photographs are taken, and the vehicle and roadway are analyzed. “These days,” he tells me, “most vehicles even come with their own black box, which may soon eliminate the need for crash reconstructionists. Event data recorders, they’re called. They tell us things the deceased cannot, like how long it took for the air bags to deploy, whether or not the driver was wearing a seat belt, or if he stepped on the accelerator in the moments before impact, or the brake.”
My eyes move to him in question, wondering just exactly which Nick stepped on: the accelerator or the brake. I envision Maisie and Nick in the car together, riding down Harvey Road. In my vision, the windows are closed, the air conditioner is on. It was hot that day, and though Maisie likes to ride with the windows all the way down, the sun in her eyes, the wind in her hair, Nick would have objected. Nick has patience for many things but never humidity or heat. I see him with his sunglasses on, though my mind knows better than this; Nick’s sunglasses now lie on top of his bedroom dresser, forgotten that day at home. He was in a hurry. Nick didn’t have his sunglasses, but in my visions there they are, perched on the bridge of his nose, and he turns to Maisie and chants a few lyrics of a song he doesn’t know. On the radio is the soundtrack toFrozen, while Maisie kicks her feet against the leather back of the passenger’s seat, keeping rhythm with the music. In her hands, a book. A board book she chose from the basket of them that sat in the center of the back seat,Goodnight Moon, because this is how the paramedics found her, with a book in hand.
Detective Kaufman excuses himself from the room, and returns seconds later with a folder in hand. He pulls photographs from the folder and slides them toward me. “I’m not sure if this is something you want to see,” he says, and I survey them indecisively. I, too, am not sure this is something I want to see. The rich red car folded around the oak tree. The side of the car crinkled into a ball like an old sheet of notebook paper, flattened and creased. Car parts scattered at random across the concrete: a side mirror, a headlight, a wedge of bumper, a hubcap. A hubcap, like the missing hubcap on the black car from the grocery store lot.
I’ve been told time and again what happened, how it was that Nick actually died. I’ve been told because I asked repeatedly, wearing on those around me. I needed someone to explain it to me, how a family car with five-star safety ratings could take my husband’s life. The air bags did deploy, I’ve been told, but it somehow failed to protect Nick’s head from the blow. It happened quickly, they said. In an instant. Nick and the air bag, they missed each other somehow.
In the image the detective shows me, black lines mark the road, skid marks, evidence of a car’s tires braking quickly and leaving rubber along the surface of the road. As a girl, I used to have races with neighborhood friends—who could create the longest skid mark. We’d line our bikes up in the cul-de-sac and rev our imaginary engines. We’d bike as fast as we could for twenty feet or more, and then squeeze tightly on the hand brake, seeing who could create the longest and darkest skid mark, just like a pink eraser leaving gummy residue along a sheet of paper.
I run my fingers across the blackened lines and say to the detective, “Skid marks. Nick slammed on the brakes. He tried to slow down.”
But Detective Kaufman responds, “Funny how these little black lines can tell us so much about what happened at the site of an accident, leaving trace evidence behind on the concrete. We call these lines here yaw marks. They’re a bit different than skid marks, which start light and get darker. Acceleration marks are just the opposite. They start dark and get lighter as the vehicle picks up speed. But yaw marks are different still. They’re curved, for one, which tells us that the car was sliding sideways at the time of impact, that the driver took a turn too quickly and slid laterally. There are striations,” he says, running a single finger along the linear lines of what the detective has termed yaw marks. “These tell us which direction the car was sliding,” he adds as he reaches out for another image where he can make clear the direction the car was sliding: right toward the burly white oak tree.
The other thing the detective elucidates with the point of his finger and a patronizing stare: the yaw marks present on the photograph are not in Nick’s lane. They’re to the left of center, on the wrong side of the solid yellow line in a no-passing zone.
“There were no skid marks at the scene,” he says quite plainly. “Your husband never stepped foot on the brake, which we were able to authenticate when we pulled the vehicle’s event data recorder. He hit that turn at the same speed as the half mile of linear road before it, which, suffice to say, was too fast. He wasn’t paying attention; he didn’t have time to anticipate the turn and slow down. The yaw marks reveal the way the car slid across the solid yellow line and into the base of the tree. The evidence puts Nick’s speed around fifty miles per hour. Harvey Road is forty-five, but drops to twenty at the bend. We surveyed the surrounding street, well before and after the crash. Acceleration marks but no skid marks. Your husband sped up before the turn. But after, there was nothing.
“You know what happens when a car flees the scene of a crime quickly?” he asks, and I shake my head and say no. And he says it then like I’m dumb, dense, empty-headed. “Acceleration marks,” he says, as if this is something I should know. He starts collecting the photographs before him, an indication that our conversation will soon be through.
“If someone ran your husband off the side of the road, they weren’t going to stick around waiting for the police to arrive. They would have picked up speed and gotten the hell out of Dodge. You know what I think happened?” Detective Kaufman asks then, staring me straight in the eye. I return the stare, though baby Felix beside me has begun to grumble. “I think your husband was driving too fast and took the turn too quickly. Maybe the sun was in his eyes and he didn’t see the turn in time. Maybe he was distracted.”
It’s then that I hear little Maisie’s sweet voice in the back seat of the car, her hot-pink Crocs kicking the back of the passenger’s seat inattentively, as if she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.
Faster, Mommy, faster, she says.
I force this notion from my mind. Nick knows better than to give in to the capricious whim of a four-year-old.
I remember the hubcap. The one missing from the black car, and also the one at the scene of the crash. I pull up the image on my phone, the black car with its missing hubcap. I set it beside the detective’s own glossy eight-by-ten. I make it clear that this could be more than a coincidence, and he exhales heavily. His patience with me is wearing thin.
“How do you know that isn’t your own hubcap?” he asks, but without waiting for my reply, “Would it lessen your concern if I spoke to the owner of the vehicle?” he asks, and I say it would. It would help immensely. Detective Kaufman finds the closeup of the license plate number on my phone’s photo album, and jots it down on a sheet of scrap paper. He tells me he’ll contact the owner and let me know what he finds.
“One more thing,” he tells me before I can rise from my chair and leave. “It came to my attention that Mr. Solberg had an Order of Protection filed against him,” he says, words that I find utterly farcical and so I laugh. It isn’t a lighthearted laugh, but an unsettled laugh, one that gets the detective’s attention.
“A restraining order?” I gasp, knowing how impossible this is. There’s no way in the world that someone would file a restraining order against Nick. Nick is gentle, kind, a pacifist. He can’t even raise his voice to me when he’s mad. The detective is wrong. This can’t be.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, staring at me in a way that suggests he isn’t wrong. “A restraining order. You didn’t know?” he asks, and it’s mockery the way he says it. He’s mocking me. I shake my head; I didn’t know. “An Emergency Order of Protection was filed against Mr. Solberg. He and the accuser were awaiting a date for the hearing for a plenary order, which would decide whether or not the Order of Protection was going to stick.”
“The accuser,” I say, more to myself than to the detective, a loaded word in and of itself,accuser, which would make Nick theaccused.This can’t be. “This has to be a mistake,” I tell the detective. “This is simply ludicrous. Nick couldn’t hurt a fly,” I say.
